Apologia

For the last seven years of his life Marshal Ferdinand Foch with his pincenez perched on his nose, sat in his little office in the top of the Hotel des Invalides covering long sheets of foolscap with his precise schoolmaster's handwriting. He was writing his memoirs. Historians and editors who hoped that these piles of paper might help solve the problem of War Guilt, define the exact value of U. S. troops in the victory, state the real contribution of the Commander-in-Chief, chafed at the thought that by the cautious Marshal's wish the book was not to be published until ten years after his death. That wish was not fulfilled. Following the death of Clemenceau and Joffre, pressure was exerted on the Foch family. U. S. readers were able to dive into the Marshal's memoirs last week.*

Those who expected to find in Foch's 530 pages an easy answer to their questions had a very imperfect knowledge of the character of the Allied Commander. Marshal Foch's book, which in the French edition bears the more precise title of Memoirs to Assist the History of the War, was to be his Apologia. And Marshal Foch, as a devout Catholic and a Latinist, knew that an apologia is not an apology but a defense. Therefore he penned a precise, colorless, painfully accurate account of what he had done from the outbreak of the War until the Allied armies of occupation seized the Rhine bridgeheads on Dec. 17, 1918.

Ferdinand Foch was a very modest man with a very level head. He realized perfectly well that it was important for the world to know what the Allied Commander-in-Chief had done in the War. He persisted in believing that the private opinions and experiences of Ferdinand Foch were of no interest to anyone. The result is a document to which might be applied the late great Gladstone's description of J. W. Cross's Life of George Eliot: "It is not a Life at all, it is a Reticence--in three volumes." Even so, many a significant fact could be ferreted out.

One August afternoon in 1870, in St. Clement's College at Metz, a serious dark-eyed boy was taking examinations for the Ecole Polytechnique, government military school at Paris. The professor of French composition, trembling with emotion, scrawled on the blackboard: "Develop this thought of Kleber's:/- 'It is essential that the young train their faculties.' " Through the open window Student Ferdinand Foch heard the distant booming of Prussian cannon. He never forgot that afternoon.

Later a victorious Pomeranian regiment was quartered in the college with Ferdinand Foch and his schoolmates. The Pomeranians were great-bearded men. They smoked china pipes, smelled of beer and onions, scowled ferociously. Ferdinand Foch never forgot that either. It helped develop his faculties.

Marshal Foch re-entered Alsace in November, 1918. He wrote in his memoirs: "On November 17 the Allied armies crossed the lines they held at the moment hostilities ceased. . . . On the 25th I entered Metz and on the 26th Strasbourg." He did not think it important to add one other fact. When he rode in triumph into Metz and Strasbourg, Marshal Foch car- ried in his hand the ancient curved sabre of General Kleber.

The problems of "War Guilt" that beset other historians did not exist for Marshal Foch. So far as he was concerned Prussia started the War in a spirit of commercial greed. The entire subject is dismissed in three pages. At the same time he blandly admits that from 1885 to 1915 he was preparing for the coming struggle, visiting France's allies, preparing plans of attack and defense. His leave in Brittany was suddenly cut short one week before Germany delivered her ultimatum to Belgium. In the same way the political problems of the War itself did not concern him. Politicians he despised and distrusted. His entire occupation was the game (played in map-littered, steam-heated staff rooms) of turning living men in uniform into dead ones.

Everyone knows that before the outbreak of hostilities Foch was a valued instructor, later commandant of the French War College. Most U. S. citizens have forgotten what he did between 1914 and 1918 when he became Commander-in-Chief. At the beginning of the War he had command of the 20th Army Corps between Toul and Nancy. His adjutant was a little slant-eyed terrier of a man, Lieut.-Col. Max Weygand. Faithful Wey- gand never left him, carries on today as Vice-President of the Higher War Council, highest peacetime post.

During the retreat before the Marne, Foch was given command of the 9th Army. Through the battle of the Marne (for which Foch gives full credit to Papa Joffre) he held this command, shared with the 4th Army the brunt of the German attack. After the Marne, Foch became assistant to Joffre, held this position until he went into temporary political banishment with the appointment of Nivelle as French Commander-in-Chief. In 1917 Foch became Chief of the French General Staff, made a flying visit to Italy to rally the Italian armies fleeing from Caporetto. In January 1918 he was urged as supreme Allied commander. British military opposition kept him from the commission. In March the British 5th Army under General Gough ran before the last desperate German offensive.

The Foch memoirs have little space to devote to the U. S. Army. He insisted that he always favored U. S. troops fighting as a unit under their own commander, made no reference to the bickerings with General Pershing which the latter has been reporting daily in the U. S. press. The Battle of St. Mihiel (a U. S. show) he considered "a splendid success." But he was critical of the Argonne advance of Oct. 4-10:

"However considerable the results obtained by the Franco-American offensive, they seemed, nevertheless, 'inferior to what it was permissible to expect against an adversary assailed everywhere and resisting at certain points with only worn out, heterogeneous and hastily assembled troops. . . .' "

Stories of the brutality with which he has been accused of receiving German delegates to the Armistice, Marshal Foch did not trouble to deny or defend. Metic- ulously he described the details of that fateful meeting on a railway siding in the forest of Compiegne--in the third person. The last ten years of the Marshal's life, he dismissed in one sentence, the last in the book:

"On June 28,1919, Peace was concluded and signed in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles."

*The Memoirs of Marshal Foch. Translated by Col. T. Bentley Mott; Doubleday Doran (85).

/-Jean Baptiste Kleber, brilliant Napoleonic General and idol of Alsace, was born in Strasbourg in 1753, was assassinated in Egypt in 1800.

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